Wrongful Termination: A Savannah Martin Novel (Savannah Martin Mystery Book 16) Read online

  “You and me both,” I told him.

  * * *

  The MNPD cleared out by late afternoon, after finding nothing more incriminating than the knife in the recycling bin.

  Judging by Goins’s expression, he thought it was plenty incriminating, but as Rafe had said, the bin was outside in the yard. Anyone, literally anyone in the whole neighborhood, could have dropped the knife in there. Goins could have put it there himself, to have an excuse to execute his search warrant. I decided to ask Grimaldi whether that was something he’d do the next time I spoke to her. Since she was spending the day, or at least part of the day, with Dix and his daughters, it wasn’t something I needed to know badly enough to interrupt them.

  Spicer and Truman had confirmed that there was some question about whether Brennan’s brake lines had been cut. The car had been pretty mangled, apparently, by the time it had been found, and the evidence had been inconclusive. There’d been damage to the brake lines, but no way to know whether it had been deliberately done before the accident, or whether the trip over the edge of the road and down what might have been a rocky embankment had done the trick.

  Goins seemed inclined to believe that the brake lines had been cut. But whether that was because he’d found the knife and thought it was connected, or whether there was something to actually suggest that the brake lines had been tampered with, Spicer couldn’t say. Since Goins also seemed determined to believe Rafe was guilty, in spite of copious evidence to the contrary, we probably couldn’t trust his instinct about the brake lines in any case.

  Spicer and Truman took off, too, with a cheery wave, and Rafe turned to me. “Alone at last.”

  And just in time for Carrie to wake up and want another feeding. I went into the house and watched him close and lock the front door. Down at the end of the driveway, the squad car carrying Spicer and Truman took a right out of the driveway and disappeared in the direction of downtown.

  “It was nice to see them,” I said.

  “Nice of Tammy to ask’em to keep an eye on things.” He glanced past me into the parlor.

  “Is that what happened? Spicer told me she’d called, but I didn’t put two and two together.”

  He nodded. “Seems that way. You wanna take a drive?”

  “I wouldn’t mind taking a drive. But can we put it off an hour, maybe, so I can feed and change Carrie, and give her a little time on the floor before we put her back in the car seat? She’s spent most of the day there.”

  “Sure,” Rafe said, and sat down on the sofa. He reached for the remote. “Mind if I change this?”

  “Not at all.” I sat down next to him and turned my attention to the manly game of basketball that appeared on the screen in lieu of my decorating show.

  Chapter Eleven

  We set out just before four. Rafe had seen the end of the game. I had fed Carrie, and changed her diaper, and spent time with her, on the floor as well as the sofa. Rafe had held her for a while, too, which never failed to make me feel good inside. He’d missed all this with his first child. When David was born Rafe had been in prison, and he hadn’t known about David’s existence until just over a year ago. By now, David was thirteen, and while that had a charm of its own—they were more like brothers when they got together, than father and son—Rafe hadn’t been a part of any of the growing up. The fact that he was here now, and got to experience every little thing our daughter did—not that she did much of anything yet—thrilled me.

  But just before four, we put Carrie back in the car seat, put on our coats, and got back in the car. Rafe took the wheel, and it didn’t surprise me at all when he started out going north on Potsdam. At Trinity Lane, we moved east to Ellington Parkway, and then headed north again—the antennae on top of the TBI building waved at us from a distance as we zoomed past—before merging with Interstate 65 going north.

  “Do you know where you’re going?” I asked.

  He asked. “Wendell gave me directions.”

  OK, then. I settled back in the seat and let him drive.

  Ridgetop is little town way up north in Davidson County, straddling the line to Robertson. It’s very hilly. On cold winter days like now, when the schools are closed for inclement weather, it’s often because the school buses can’t make it up and down the steep and winding roads in this part of the county.

  We stayed on the interstate past Rivergate, past Goodlettsville and Millersville, and then struck out north. Pretty soon there was nothing to see but trees and fields and the occasional driveway. We hadn’t met another car since we’d left the interstate.

  “It’s easy to see how someone could drive off the road up here and not be found until the next morning. Especially at night.”

  It wasn’t night now, but it was still deserted.

  Rafe nodded. He was scanning left and right as he drove. In the backseat, Carrie hadn’t gone back to sleep yet, but was looking around with big eyes.

  “Do you know where it happened?”

  He shook his head. “Wendell told me where to find Brennan’s house. This is the straightest route there from the TBI. I’m looking to see if I can find where he went off the road.”

  “Be careful.” We were cresting a hill, and at the top of it was a sign with squiggly lines and the words Bridge Freezes Before Road.

  Rafe slowed down. On his own he probably wouldn’t have bothered, but with me and Carrie in the car, he obviously didn’t want to take any chances.

  The road crested and then dropped on the other side. The car picked up speed again. Until Rafe put his foot on the brake.

  The car objected, and we fishtailed for a second before he got the car back under control. “They weren’t kidding,” I said.

  He shook his head, and pulled the car over on the side of the road. Just ahead, on the shoulder and down the hill to our right, was the evidence of a lot of activity. The gravel shoulder of the road was broken in several places, and there were the imprints of tire tracks in the dirt. Down through the field and woods next to us ran several pairs of tracks across the grass.

  Rafe reached for his door handle. “I’ll keep the engine running so you’ll be warm.”

  “That’s not necessary.” I was wearing a coat, and the last thing I wanted was to run out of gas here, in the middle of nowhere. We still hadn’t seen a soul since we left the interstate, and hadn’t passed a gas station, either. It was rural up here. “We don’t know how long you’ll be gone. I’d rather not risk it.”

  He hesitated, but turned the key in the ignition. The engine fell silent. “Here.” He handed the keys over. “I don’t imagine it’ll take long, but just in case.”

  I didn’t ask in case of what, just took the keys. “Be careful.”

  “I don’t imagine there’s anything to worry about,” Rafe said.

  “I wasn’t afraid that somebody would be down there with a shotgun.” Although there have been cases of the murderer returning to the scene of the crime. If Brennan had been murdered, his murderer could decide to come back.

  Or maybe he’d shot out one of Brennnan’s tires with a high-powered rifle from a mile away, and that was why Doug Brennan had gone off the road. Maybe he was watching us right now.

  But surely that was ridiculous. I shook it off. “Just make sure you don’t fall and break your leg. I’m not sure I can haul you back up here again if you do.”

  He nodded. “I’ll see you in a few minutes.”

  He got out and closed the car door. I locked myself and Carrie in, for good measure, since you never know. And then I watched Rafe drop over the edge of the road and head down across the grass to the trees in the distance.

  Sitting here, it was easy to see what had happened. At least it seemed obvious to me. Brennan had crested the hill on his way home Thursday night. It had been late and dark. There were no street lights on this road, and no houses nearby that would have had their lights on. And the time of month was wrong for a full moon. So it had been dark. It was cold this time of year. The sign on the ot
her side of the hill warned of ice.

  He’d either crested the hill, and there’d been ice, and he’d gone off the road and across the grass into the trees. An accident.

  Or he’d crested the hill and something had been there, like a deer or a rabbit or even just someone walking a dog. He’d swerved to avoid them, and had gone off the road. Also an accident. And probably one involving an animal rather than a human, since if there’d been a person involved, I would hope that he or she would have gone to check on Brennan, or at least would have called 911 for help for him. That hadn’t been done, so chances were no one but Doug Brennan had been here.

  Unless someone had been here, but had been up to no good, and he or she hadn’t wanted it known that they were here. But it would take a pretty cold person to let someone else drive off the road and die without helping them, just to keep secret the fact that you’d been here. I like to think that most people are better than that.

  By now Rafe had made his way down to the bottom of the steepest incline and was following the tire tracks toward the trees, looking left and right. I watched for a second, and then went back to my thoughts.

  The third solution was that someone had cut Brennan’s brake cables, hoping for an accident. That pointed to someone at the TBI, since that’s where Brennan had been on Thursday.

  Whoever cut the cables couldn’t have known exactly when the brakes would go out, though. They might have gone out when Brennan was on his way out of the TBI parking lot, and that accident wouldn’t have been fatal at all. Brennan would have hauled his car to the shop and discovered that the brakes had been tampered with. And surely the hypothetical tamperer wouldn’t have wanted that.

  If the accident had happened on Ellington Parkway, on the other hand, or on the interstate or up here, the results would have been much as expected. Which I assumed would have been the reason someone did it. To get rid of Brennan.

  But again, he or she wouldn’t have had any way to control where the accident happened unless he or she was actually here.

  Rafe reached the trees and stopped.

  I decided to look at the problem from a different angle. The angle of who’d want to get rid of Brennan.

  I knew nothing about him, except what Rafe had told me. He was in his forties, with thinning hair and glasses, and sat at a desk. He was Wendell’s supervisor, which meant he was someone who worked with undercover agents at the TBI. At a guess, he probably oversaw several of them and their handlers, and coordinated operations, and things like that.

  I knew he lived out here, in Ridgetop, in what Wendell called a cabin. He hadn’t mentioned a family, so maybe Brennan lived alone. A bachelor, someone who’d never been married, or maybe divorced or a widower.

  Or gay. No reason he couldn’t be gay.

  If I’d wanted to get rid of someone like Brennan, I think I would have staged a home invasion at his cabin in the woods. Far away from everyone, and with no chance that anyone would stop by until someone got suspicious. That’d be easier than messing with his brake lines in a busy parking lot, and there’d be less chance that something would backfire.

  Of course, it would also take killing him personally, and I could see why someone might want to shy away from that. Much easier to tamper with someone’s car and then leave the results to fate. Your hands wouldn’t be exactly clean then either, but at least they wouldn’t be bloody.

  But whoever did this—if anyone did it—might have wanted to make it look like an accident. Hard to do that with a home invasion gone wrong. It hadn’t taken Goins long at all to find the compromised brake cables, though. So this hadn’t looked like an accident for long, either.

  Unless the brake cables weren’t actually compromised, and Goins was imagining things.

  Rafe must have looked around enough, because when I glanced in his direction, he was on his way back.

  So who’d want to get rid of Brennan?

  To Goins, it made sense that Rafe did. And if I hadn’t known my husband, and if he hadn’t had an alibi and been more than an hour away on Thursday night, I could see why. There are people who have done worse than kill a supervisor after losing their job.

  Had Brennan fired anyone else? Had they been cleaning house of other people too, at the beginning of the new year, or was it just Rafe who’d gotten the boot?

  And why was someone trying to implicate Rafe? Whoever it was couldn’t have known that we’d be in Sweetwater the night Brennan was killed. It had been a spur of the moment decision, and we hadn’t told anyone we were leaving. We hadn’t told anyone we’d be coming, either. Both Mother and Grimaldi had been taken by surprise. The Harley-Davidson had been parked outside the house on Potsdam while we were gone, so if anyone had driven by, they would have seen it. And might have assumed that if the bike was there, Rafe was there, too.

  If we’d been home Thursday night, this frame-up might have looked very different. As it was, Goins was spending valuable time looking at Rafe anyway. And while he was doing that, someone else was getting away with murder.

  Rafe climbed the last few feet up onto the road, and I unlocked the doors and waited until he’d gotten back into the driver’s seat. “Who’d want Brennan dead?”

  He shot me a look. “If I knew that, darlin’, this wouldn’t be near the problem it is.”

  Uh-oh. “I didn’t realize it was a problem,” I said. “I mean… not really. Goins is running around looking at you for a murder you didn’t commit, that might not even be a murder. I know it’s annoying, but I didn’t really consider it a problem.”

  He held his hand out for the key, and I dropped it in his palm. His inserted it in the ignition before he answered. “It ain’t a problem. Not really. I’ve just spent a lotta time getting talked to by cops for stuff I didn’t do.”

  He had. And that made it easy to understand why this would bother him. Although— “A lot of stuff you did, too,” I pointed out.

  A corner of his mouth—the one I could see—curved. “You got a point.”

  The car pulled away from the shoulder and rolled off down the road. I contorted my neck to look into the back. Carrie had fallen asleep again. I lowered my voice a degree, just in case. “You’re not really worried he’ll arrest you, are you?”

  Rafe shrugged. “Hard to see how he’d get a judge and jury to convict on so little evidence. But it’d be a hassle while it went on.”

  No question.

  “To get back to what I asked you. I realize you don’t know who might have wanted Brennan dead. Specifically. And that’s if anyone wanted him dead, and this wasn’t just an accident. Goins might be seeing a crime that isn’t here.”

  Rafe nodded.

  “But if someone wanted him dead. Who’d that be? Not specifically. But what sort of reason might someone have for wanting someone like Doug Brennan out of the way?”

  “Any number of personal reasons,” Rafe said, steering the car down the road. “He mighta cheated at cards. He mighta been sleeping with someone’s wife. He mighta cut someone off on the road, and they followed him off the highway and forced him off the road.”

  That last one hadn’t occurred to me earlier, but it made a certain kind of sense. There are all sorts of crazies out there. As for the others… “He wasn’t married, I guess? Wendell didn’t mention a wife. So at least we can eliminate a cheating wife who wanted him gone so she could marry her lover.”

  Rafe nodded. “He’s divorced. Wife’s remarried and lives somewhere like Boca Raton, or maybe Baton Rouge. Two kids. Neither of’em old enough to think of this.”

  “Money?”

  “I’m sure he gets paid OK,” Rafe said, and corrected it to, “Did. But nobody in law enforcement gets rich. Least not honestly.”

  Right. “Without having seen it, the property might be worth a few dollars, but probably not millions or anything like that. Not out here.” Different if it had been in Williamson County. The south of us goes for more money than the north.

  “His kids’d get it anyway,” Rafe sa
id, which was true. And property is a dime a dozen out here, so it didn’t make sense that anyone would kill him for it. Unless they knew something I didn’t. Oil or natural gas deposits or something like that. Or the rumor that someone was going to be building something big out this way, that would increase property values dramatically. I could make some inquiries at work as to whether that was likely.

  “Guess that means you’ll be going to the sales meeting Monday morning,” Rafe said.

  Every week, LB&A has a big sales meeting, during which we discuss closings, new listings, and anything else that’s going on in the company and the real estate world at large that might affect us. I’d had no closings and had no new listings, but it wouldn’t be strange at all for me to bring up the question of whether anything was going on, real estate wise, in Ridgetop.

  “If you wouldn’t mind taking Carrie for a couple of hours.”

  “Not like I got anything else to do,” Rafe said with a shrug.

  “Still thinking about the Grimaldi thing?”

  He glanced over. “Thinking I might do it. Now that I understand the job better.”

  And not the part of the job that was on the books and understandable. The part that involved sniffing out whether any of his new colleagues were doing something they shouldn’t be.

  “But not while this is going on.”

  “It might work well to do it while this is going on. We know, and Grimaldi knows, that you had nothing to do with what happened to Brennan. But that little bit of official suspicion might help you down in Columbia.” Might help him to look less squeaky clean to anyone who’d look at him with suspicion.

  Not that there’s anything very squeaky clean about my husband. And not that anyone who knew anything about his background would form that opinion, anyway.

  But at any rate, it couldn’t hurt.

  He gave me a look that was roughly divided between amusement and appreciation. “I hadn’t thought about that.”